Sebastian Mallaby’s biography of Alan Greenspan does just about everything right. Despite its length, it’s eminently readable. Yet there’s nothing superficial about it: Mallaby seems no less comfortable with economics than he is with English, allowing expert monetary and macro-economists to join non-expert readers in both enjoying and learning from his carefully-crafted book.
But what is perhaps the greatest strength of The Man Who Knew is its success in steering a safe course between hagiography on one hand and hatchet-job on the other. Mallaby is evidently fond of his subject, who comes across here as exceedingly intelligent and talented (had he not had such a head for figures, Greenspan might have played the sax, or perhaps the clarinet, for a living), politically shrewd, and (to women especially) almost preternaturally charming. Yet when it comes to accounting for the former Fed Chairman’s failures along with his achievements, Mallaby doesn’t cook the books. Because his criticisms come across as those of a sincere if somewhat crestfallen admirer, they seem all the more damning.
Most damning of all is Mallaby’s claim that, for all his knowledge and cleverness, and despite his having written a long paper, in 1959, arguing that central banks should guard against “speculative flights from reality” by choking-off asset bubbles while they’re getting started, at the Fed Greenspan, instead of seeking to pop incipient bubbles, became a virtuoso bubble blower.